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Friday, October 5, 2007

Launch – 7 days and counting

Moscow
day 2

Finally
got to sleep around 1AM this morning and we have an 8:30 AM pickup to go visit
Star City, where the cosmonauts train for spaceflight. It is a two hour drive
from our hotel; we got to the guard gate of Star City and waited for our tour
guide Dimitri. The trip was worthwhile, we saw the cosmonaut cultural center,
and went to Yuri Gagarin’s office where all cosmonauts visit before going to
Baikonur for launch- it is thought to be a lucky place, so we touched his desk
for good fortune. We then went down the “walk of heroes” to the training
center. There we saw the MIR space station model, the Soyuz capsule and the
statue of Gagarin with the stain glass window behind.

We saw the underwater training
facility- a circular pool that is 16 meters deep and contains a full size ISS
trainer- this is where the cosmonauts train for extra vehicular activity (EVA).
We also saw the largest (18m) man rated centrifuge in the world - very
impressive.

Then Chai-Fei and Tammy return to
the IBMP laboratory to visit the cells and feed them. We also had some hardware
o-rings to autoclave. All is well in the lab.